Weekend Wrap-Up: Maze Runs Laps Around Competetion

September 22nd, 2014

The Maze Runner easily won the weekend box office race this past weekend beating expectations by a little bit with $32.51 million. Unfortunately, the other new releases were not as strong and their combined totals were about 25% lower than the number one film. Overall, the box office was $103 million, which is 14% higher than last weekend and 18% higher than the same weekend last year. This is a fantastic result, given the box office troubles of the past several weeks. Year-to-date, 2014 is still behind 2013 by a large margin at $7.38 billion to $7.75 billion, which is a 4.8% deficit. Hopefully this win will help the box office going forward and the fall will be better than the summer was.

Do you want to know how happy the studio was with The Maze Runner's opening weekend? The quickest answer, The Scorch Trials already has a release date. This makes total sense, as the movie only cost $34 million to make, but brought in $32.51 million during its opening weekend. Unless the film has absolutely terrible legs, it will pay for its entire production budget domestically. If it has strong legs and reaches the $100 million milestone, then it will pay for its combined production and P&A budget. This is within reach, especially with overall positive reviews and the lack of direct competition over the coming weeks.

This is Where I Leave You managed third place with $11.56 million, which was just a little above expectations. Unfortunately, its reviews are not good and I don't expect its legs will be great. Then again, it only cost $20 million to make, so it won't have to earn too much more domestically to give it a chance to break even sooner rather than later.

No Good Deed fell from first to fourth with $9.79 million, which is a 60% drop-off. This is a bad result, but not surprising, given its reviews. That said, it only cost $13.2 million, so its running tally of $39.70 million after just ten days of release is still great.

Dolphin Tale 2 rounded out the top five with $8.87 million over the weekend for a total of $26.93 million after two weeks of release. This is less than the original made during its third weekend of release. It's a disappointing run so far, but the film wasn't that expensive to make, so it could break even sometime on the home market.

One final note, Guardians of the Galaxy has overtaken Iron Man 2's final tally earning $5.24 million over the weekend for a total of $313.73 million. By this time next week, it will have overtaken Iron Man and pull into third place on the Avengers franchise list.